Diary Of A Chinese Tour: Androsace — The Final Entry

In less than a couple of years Androsace has turned into one of the most important bands of Shanghai and China, and probably the biggest metal band from Shanghai in these days. They are seriously dedicated to their music and their project, they are not only talented, but also smart keeping themselves focused targetting right what is important for them, and what it is not. Besides all this, they are one of the coolest band of China’s scene because of their down to earth attitudes, and their open minded approach to talk with everyone, and about whatever.

At the beginning of this year they jumped into the adventure of touring China. With really few resources, but lots of motivation and energy, they did a great job, of what they should be proud of themselves. Ten Chinese cities, plus Midi festival in Beijing, a bag full of great experiences for the band, and probably lots of new themes for their future songs.

Layabozi is very proud to have documented, and informed about the first tour of one of the most relevant bands from China right now. This was Androsace’s Diary Of A Tour In China.

By Dario

Finally we’re back, our 2012 China Tour is over, drumsticks are almost all broken and baijiu bottles are all empty. It’s time to make some considerations. It has been a long tour, even if we didn’t do it all in a row, which means that somebody might have noticed that between one gig and another it was still possible to run into our twins in places like Inferno or Yuyintang.

Well, I have to say, and I think is fair enough, we arranged our tour dates only in the weekends. We had to do this because we all have jobs (almost), and we had not choice but to respect everybody’s schedule. We didn’t want to give up the dream of making a tour in China and therefore we compromised. Arranging the tour itself was not complicated, but it took a lot of time, calls, and meetings in order to be sure that everybody was cool with everything. We had our arguments and concerns like: “why the f*** (sic) we have to go to this unknown city where nobody ever played?” [Ed. Notes: now they finished their diary they are cutting the f’s (!)]

Well, we just needed a good amount of courage, curiosity, insanity and who cares! attitude for breaking the Shanghai’s border and go inland. We didn’t want to confine our experience to the city we all live in, we wanted to break this crystal ball and explore what was out there. We wanted to share the same experience that all foreign bands we always saw in Yuyintang were doing, trying to understand the feeling of playing in front of all strangers, try to build our own portfolio of groupies and run far away from the same (but always welcome them) friendly faces in the crowd in the same old venues. We wanted to experience to play always on different drum kits, amps, and sound systems.

Our first gig in Nanchang was really amazing, and still one of the best in terms of reception, and friendly people. As an overall experience we think that Heitie Livehouse can be considered the best venue we played during all the tour. I won’t get into the details of each gig because that has been done in all the entries published in this diary here, though I would like to keep the general emotion and feeling that we are sharing now. We are just feeling that we did something, I don’t really know what we achieved, but we had a lot, a lot, of fun! Yes, because we just did what we love to do, playing music, our music, and we did it while travelling across the big China. Isn’t that enough?

It will feel a bit strange the next weekend, and the incoming months. We won’t need to rush to any train station or any airport! Touring is a big test for a band, is crucial to understand the real commitment that is going on, the real engagement of each of us to this project, and this dream. Touring together you discover new interesting things, like which kind of underwear your band mates use (somebody is a big intimate fan of Start Wars), if they brush their teeth before go to sleep, and if they snore loud or not. And trust me watching the ugly faces in the morning after a wild night of fun is really much more scary then the whole horror movie collection put together!

On different levels, we all did our part in making this come true, of course as everything, as in a relationship, there’s somebody doing a bigger active role and others that prefer to follow, one who prefers to stay on top, and the other one thats prefer more kinky stuff, but that’s cool, if somebody can manage the whole orgy-organization smoothly, then that resulsts in pleasure for all. And until a certain point it worked really well!

I think that this tour shaped, and made much clear the equilibrium inside the band. We understood how to deal with problems, how to deal with different characters, playing in bad mood, or totally wasted how to compromise each other blowing out in noisy arguments like who was gonna sleep in the same bedroom with the drunken guy of the night! All these elements are all part of the game of being in a band. It was all a great experience for us, and we believe that next one will be much better. Much better in terms of organization, recruiting roadies, budgeting, and time efficiency. We won’t play again in some venues I guess, but sure we will explore new ones! We will meet new local bands and we will play again with some of them!

Now it’s almost 24 hours left before the closing date of our tour, playing in Shanghai will always feel good and we will always feel safe on Yuyintang stage or Live Bar or 696. For Androsace it will be the closing of a chapter, the closing of two years of non stop activities, from song writing to lots of gigs, from recording to cd release and touring. We’ve been quite busy and it’s time to stop, refresh, change hair style, and start all over again with much more energy, much more goals to be achieved, and much more experiences to be shared with those who always been really close to us!

A special thanks goes to our tour buddies from BigongBijing, they trusted in this tour and our organization (really!). And they made it with us until the end! We found out only now that they were sponsored by the finest Chinese baijiu brand and that’s where their money were coming from! Now I know why while drinking it they were looking straight in the camera like they were acting in a commercial! Another special thanks goes of course to Mache from Layabozi who supported us in publishing our diaries, at the end we don’t know how really people were interested to read our adventures! Well our duty was to share all this with you, try to bring you the feeling of touring, maybe trying to look a bit cool, and get some girl’s interest. Well, to make the best of it was up to you!

In terms of what this tour has been we can say here what our Lenz want to say:

The main achievement has been finishing the tour with only one member who lost his job!

The biggest failure has been to cancel few shows, especially Castle Bar somewhere close to Shanghai…

The greatest moments have been eating with new friends and smashing bottles in Nanchang and all the street food we had in all different cities